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It does not seem to me that positive change can be built on just flipping off all the bad people.
If nothing else, one way to offend bad people is to also be bad yourself. There has to be a positive vision somewhere. A politics of nothing but contempt and hatred is an inherently sterile politics.
One thing I find annoying about Trump is that he generally has a zero-sum mindset. If Canada is happy with how trade with the US works, then that means that they are shafting the US. If Iran agreed to the deal, then that deal was obviously contrary to US interests. If the Democrats get really angry when he fires National Park employees, then it is in his interests to fire them.
Real life is not a zero-sum game, but often closer to a coordination problem. Sometimes, playing defect will be beneficial, but often, if you solve for equilibrium on iteration, you will find that the new equilibrium is much more inadequate than the old one, leaving money on the table because the zero-sum mindset people were unable to coordinate.
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TROLLING ALONE MOVES THE WHEELS OF HISTORY
My apparent new catchphrase aside, Musk does have a positive vision. Too much of one in fact, for his dissident right allies. And even if he did not, sterile politics produces results. Namely, replacing one group of elites with another, with different interests.
The managerial class has to go. Its social contract has expired. Something, anything, other must replace it. If that something is just whomever fights them the most ostensibly, so be it.
I agree, but I think the death of it will be the same thing that brought it into existence; technology.
A big part of the emergence of the PMC was that technologies in various domains, but most especially in transportation and communication, allowed for corporations and governments to become larger and more complex. Where, before, a company was only about as big as the number of relationships a central manager (often The President of the company) could, well, manage, telecommunications, expedited travel (for purposes of shipping if nothing else), and cheap and quick document copying made the entire idea of "middle managers" possible.
Anyone who's worked in software knows that the primary responsibility of a Product Manger (PM) is to mostly coordinate between sales, engineering, marketing, and the executives. Depending on the specific company there may be more or less stakeholders, but you get the idea. While the PM job is always marketed (and self-reported) to be about "crafting a vision for the product!" the truth of it is you're dealing with multiple groups that sort of hate each other or, at the least, don't get along. You facilitate the communication. If you do it well, you slowly accrue political capital either explicitly or implicitly. The PM vertical is often a path to COO or CEO because of the ambiguous soft-power nature of the job. It is the ultimate technical-adjacent PMC gig.
LLMs / A(G)I is going to destroy the power of the PM by making their job easier. PMs will request that all of the various stakeholders (marketing, engineering, sales, etc.) simply send various documents and reports to the PM. He or she will then point an LLM at it with vague prompts along the lines of "resolve conflicting priorities, organize a sprint plan, calculate budget" etc. etc. etc. And the LLM will do it. Well enough. And the covert power games that a lot of PMs play including hiding information between groups, playing politics and personalities off of one another, injecting themselves into obvious successes while running away from failures, and trend-chasing budget leverage matches will disappear because ... the information will simply be flowing between these groups with far, far less friction.
Bezos at Amazon had an infamous e-mail wherein he essentially told all of the product groups within Amazon that they had to work with one another using APIs only. Here's a link that explains it well. Bezos realized that if these different product teams needed to cross-coordinate, it would eventually break amazon as they would scale to so many product teams that coordination, done manually, would easily eat up 1000s of collective hours per week. LLMs 10x or maybe 100x the reduction of friction based on the same principle Bezos relied on here.
Culturing warring to change the culture (i.e. get rid of the PMC) might be noble, but, at best, its a war of attrition with a very entrenched interest who will use all sorts of nasty tricks (DEI etc.) to keep itself in place. But it's far harder to fight against a good technology. Take the best software engineer on the planet - if he has to write all of his code on a typewriter, he is now the worst software engineer on the planet. So, a PM who continues to try and run time consuming team Zoom meetings, who wants to create process forms left and right, and who plays office politics will simply start to produce less than the LLM enabled PM. But that very LLM enabled PM will reveal the job for what it is - glorified Virtual Assistant. Executives will start to realize they ought not to replace their engineers with LLMs necessarily, but that they should replace folks who's jobs' are mostly about coordination and communication. (Side note: Coordination and communication don't require absolute specific correctness the way say some financial jobs might. Hallucinations are totally acceptable as long as the "gist" is clear conveyed).
So, Elon. He's got his chainsaw, he's got his DOGEs with him, he's getting into fights with Little Marco Rubio.
A better move would be to find another $1 bn for Grok.
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It seems to me that Musk might be one of the only people with a positive vision of the future, even if one finds it totally ludicrous. Everything else is rear-guard action and accomplishes very little.
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What do you think the justice system and police do? Sure, they sometimes reallocate some resources to victims, but the vast majority of their job is punishing bad people.
The justice system does not exist to spite criminals. It exists to maintain public order and occasionally dispense justice.
And what actions does it take in pursuit of those goals?
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To the extent that "maintaining public order" is compatible with normalized widespread criminality and the dispensation of justice becomes more and more evidently an afterthought, one notices that the justice system's capacity for performing this function declines precipitously.
It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.
Are you sure? Even last year homicide seems to have fallen again and certainly in PA's large cities we are now at a near 10 year low, and much much lower than we were in the 80's.
In Philly the homicide rate peaked at over 44 (per 100,000) in the mid 1980's. Dropping to about 16 in the early 2010's, it peaked again at about 35 in 2021 but has dropped again down to just over 17 for 2024. And so far in the year it is about 35% down on last year, which means we might actually get the lowest homicide rate in the last 50 years in 2025. Pittsburgh's numbers seem to following the same rough trajectory.
For the whole US the peak appears to have been 1991 with 10.7 before reaching a low of 4.7 in 2014 before increasing to 7.75 in 2021, and decreasing to 5.2 for 2024. So similar trends across the nation. Estimates for the 1950s and 60s put the figure around 5 then as well. So 2024 was one of the least violent (looking at homicides) years in modern US history.
The evidence seems to suggest that not only can we actually maintain a level of violent criminality much higher than we are currently at (not that I am saying that is a good idea of course!) that our current rate is not actually all that high (historically) as the Covid era increase has largely now vanished.
Just for comparison, my homeland had a homicide rate about 31 per 100,000 at the peak of the Troubles in the early 70's but had decreased to about 0.8 before Covid. It spiked up to around 1.3 during Covid and dropped back to 0.7 in 2024.
I think the evidence shows that public order can in fact be maintained with significantly higher levels of criminality and lower levels of punishing bad people. I am not advocating for that being a good idea just to be clear!
Just pointing out we do have a pretty high tolerance all in all, and that if current means whatever punishing we are doing in 2024 and so far in 2025 it seems to be working pretty well.
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Having withdrawn from the excesses of the Floyd/COVID era, we're noticeably better off than in the Crack Era, so I don't think we're at an unsustainable point. There's a lot of ruin in a nation, or perhaps more appropriately -- "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept"
Norms are still dropping, monotonously in sequence. It's entirely possible that Trump and the MAGA movement will fail. If they do, it doesn't seem likely to me that we simply return to the status quo ante.
Depends on what comes after them. It could be a new leftist bad idea. It could be a new rightist bad idea. Or it could be the Return of The Good Responsible People Who Trust The Experts. In none of those cases will we return to the status quo ante. But collapse due to crime doesn't seem likely at our current level or on our current trajectory.
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Not really. You could get a lot of positive change simply by identifying and liquidating the right elements. Look at the power the french revolution unleashed without any coherent vision, simply by executing entire classes of people and confiscating all their horrifically misallocated assets.
It wasn't the "temple of rationality" and the decimal calendar that let them fight off the whole of Europe. It was liquidating the existing order in a tide of violence and hate.
An awful lot of America's problems could be solved by tearing off the cover over government spending and taking a hot poker to the blood-sucking parasites clogging up the system. No other reforms needed. Suddenly ten billion dollar federal grants to build EV charging stations might actually get something done instead of being laundered into handouts for party members through dozens of layers of non-profits and agencies.
Correction- it was Napoleon’s willingness to direct civilian resources towards the military. Levee en masse was the main reason France broke Prussian and Austrian power so thoroughly.
Long before Napoleon, I mean the original first coalition wars.
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You mean establishing a totalitarian state worshipping reason as a god (for a while) which forcibly conscripted much of the population (for the first time ever)?
Historical demographics are quite different from today's. On the eve of WWI, Europe had 25% of the world's population. To copypaste an old comment of mine a bit later:
In 1800, metropolitan France had about 30 million people and Russia 25 million (including many Poles, just incorporated, who would support Napoleon.)
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I would argue, actually, that Revolutionary France developed extremely impressive state capacity, and it was its near-unprecedented level of mobilisation of resources that allowed it to fight off half of Europe. That wasn't something that automatically appeared in the absence of the king, but rather had everything to do with the systems of government of the new republic, some inherited from before the revolution, but some built anew as well. That level of organisation just doesn't come from nowhere.
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